Stanford: MBI’s First Study Trip

Located 35 miles south of San Francisco, Palo Alto is a relatively small community, modest in its appearance, but home to the renowned Stanford University, and to a considerable number of Silicon Valley high-tech companies. These are just two of the good reasons to organize our first official MBI study trip to Palo Alto, California.

The MBI group was composed by 15 MBI students (the so called “MBI pioneers”, who started the program in September 2010), accompanied by MBI Coordinator Cristina Viehmann and CEDIM’s Academic Director Jorge Gómez.

The first stop on our trip was the Center of Design Research (CDR) at Stanford, an institution dedicated to understanding innovation in practice and education. Our host at the CRD was Deputy Director Martin Steinert. Martin walked and talked our group through the different components of Stanford’s design activities: the Product Realization Lab, the d.school and the design group of Mechanical Engineering (ME310).

At the CDR, our students took the Innovation Implementation course with Dr. Hilary Austen, MBI professor and author of “Artistry Unleashed”, an unconventional business book about what the analytical mind can learn from the creative mind. Guided by Hilary, students took a deep dive into the topic of personal artistry – “the ability to harness originality and mastery to enhance performance and help solve today’s most demanding problems”.

On our trip we went on to explore the innovation models of two of the world’s best-known innovation companies: IDEO and Jump.

We had the privilege of meeting Chris Flink, partner at IDEO and associate professor at Stanford University, who gave us the tour through the IDEO offices and laboratories. Among the IDEO highlights were the infamous shopping cart featured in the Nightline special of 1999, the toy lab, the 3D printing lab, as well as the colorful and playful work areas, which included hanging bicycles, playground slides and a VW bus transformed into a meeting room.

At Jump, a growth strategy firm founded by Dev Patnaik (author of “Wired to Care”), Director of Marketing Clynton Taylor gave us a lecture about Jump’s hybrid approach, consisting in integrating empathy, creativity, and strategy. Jump describes itself as a company dealing with highly ambiguous situations. According to Clynton, Jump’s antidote for ambiguity is hybridity, i.e. multidisciplinartiy, if possible concentrated in the very same person: a mash-up between what Jump calls “the humanist, the technologist and the capitalist”.

Last stop on our list was the California College of the Arts (CCA), one of the premier fine arts and design institutions in the United States. At the CCA we met Nathan Shedroff, program chair for CCA’s MBA in Design Strategy program. It was more than an honor for us to sit and chat with Nathan and to learn more about a great master program that shares the views and values of the Master in Business Innovation (MBI) at CEDIM: “a unique program that unites the perspectives of design thinking, sustainability, finance, entrepreneurship and leadership into a holistic strategic framework.”